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Even though I’ve managed this year to tag the Consumer Electronics Show on to a fantastic family holiday to LA and now Las Vegas, the fact that the world’s biggest electronics showcase is about to start has still filled me with the familiar feeling of dread, stress and pre-emptive fatigue.

As Ewan Spence so eloquently discusses it in his Just Say No To CES article yesterday, the CES is in many ways an unwieldy monster of an event. A place where the amount of stuff going on - and the amount of stuff being written about what’s going on - is so overwhelming that it can start to feel as if actually nothing is going on. Or nothing of any importance, anyway.

With so much to see and so little time to see it in, Ewan’s point about journalists not having ‘the opportunity to critically talk about products’ in the ‘rush to blog and cover’ is well made and, in many journalist cases, one hundred per cent correct.

However, having dragged myself away from the comfort of my post-Christmas home in England to Las Vegas for the CES for more years now than I care to mention, I still believe there are compelling reasons to keep attending. And even more weirdly, despite CES usually leaving me feeling like I’ve been hit by some sort of high-tech truck, those feelings of dread, stress and pre-emptive fatigue I mentioned earlier are also joined by a faint but undeniable pulse of excitement.

The bad stuff

Before I get into what I feel are the good things about attending CES, though, I should say that there are a couple of areas where I agree whole-heartedly with Ewan’s anti-CES arguments. First, it’s terrifyingly easy to find yourself just swallowing and regurgitating the monumental bits of PR fluff that surround the CES without applying any critical thought to them. Second, you can indeed these days get much of the same information/PR fluff sent to you by email to your quiet, relatively relaxed desk on the other side of the world.

In fact, many companies now send out their CES press releases at the start of their CES press conferences, so journalists sat peacefully at home actually get the information an hour earlier than the journalists who’ve slogged their guts out to get to Vegas and then queued up to squeeze into a tiny, hard-backed seat for the most popular brands’ product unveilings.

What’s more, the press conferences have to cover everything a new brand might have to say, making it impossible for them to include any depth at all on any specific product area. So the press releases you get emailed on individual products often contain far more information than the press conferences can give you. As a result, I now myself completely avoid the press conferences, choosing instead to just sit by my computer in my hotel room and watch the press releases roll in - much as Ewan sits by his computer in Scotland.

The good bits

The thing is, though, that CES isn’t just about press day. You do also get the chance in the following days to maraud the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center actually looking at the products described in such glowing terms in the brands’ press materials. And as Ewan points out, you can sometimes get the chance if you’re a well-known journalist or you work for a well-known publication to get ‘hands on’ time with new products in relatively quite behind the scenes locations.

Hilariously glamorous picture of the Las Vegas Convention Center where much (though by no means all!) of the CES 'magic' happens.

In other words, it’s only if you’re at the CES that you get an almost immediate opportunity to put the endless ‘best things ever made’ PR proclamations to the test and offer some immediate critical appraisal of the actual performance of the products in front of you.

The obvious riposte to this assertion is that the brands all have their products very specifically set up to show them off to their best advantage, in ultra-bright, noisy, bustling settings that make it difficult to apply any serious critical testing criteria of the sort you can use in the comfort of your own home or office. However, it is still possible to spot performance flaws with some new technologies from the CES halls.

The truth is out there

For instance, if I’d just gone on the press information about Samsung’s 110-inch 8K glasses-free 3D TV at last year’s CES, I’d probably be convinced it was the greatest product in the history of television. Hands-on experience of it on the CES show floor, however, revealed it to be more likely to give you a headache than a joyous AV experience (check out Hands On With Samsung's 110-inch 8K Glasses Free 3D TV - AKA My Head Hurts).

This is an unusually extreme example I’ll grant you, but time and again I find myself spotting issues when I see products in the flesh at CES that you would never have believed existed if you’d just gone from the press releases.

Another unexpected benefit to actually visiting the CES is that it really doesn’t have to be just a one-way street where you’re bombarded with PR spin. If you can manage to set up meetings with the right people - something which can be agonizingly difficult, admittedly - you can actually enjoy genuine two way conversations, sometimes with engineers more willing to discuss the potential fallibilities of their new innovations than you might expect.

I'd even say it's possible as a journalist to have a positive impact on new products by attending CES. There have certainly been occasions where potential problems raised by myself or fellow journalists about a feature or some aspect of a product’s performance have been picked up on by a brand’s attendant engineers and actually acted on before the finished products are launched.

One last thing about actually being at the CES I've noticed over the years is that it's only if you're there that you get an immediate feeling for 'buzz' - as in, which innovations genuinely seem to have caught the imagination of the public at large (well, the industry and journalist attendees, anyway) and which ones only seem to have caught the imagination of the brands trying to push them.

Qualifications

There are two important qualifications to add to all my pro-CES sentiment, though. First, I don’t think it necessarily holds true with all product areas. While the CES may offer advantages in the areas of TV and home cinema projection I work in (predominantly because I’m usually dealing with large screens where performance issues are relatively easy to see, and because most of the brands in the TV and projection area actually attend CES) it likely doesn’t offer nearly as much advantage to writers working in other areas. Particularly the area of mobile devices where Ewan predominantly operates, where screens are small and some of the biggest players no longer attend CES.

The other qualification is that CES only works in any truly useful way if you really limit what you look at. For my first couple of shows I ran round like a headless chicken trying to see every shiny new AV thing the show had to offer - and all I got from it was a headache, a camera full of crap photos and a bunch of soundbites.

Now I stick almost exclusively to just the major TV and projector brands, which means I actually have enough time to get a genuine sense of what each brand is up to in those areas, what key trends are developing, what’s really hot - and what’s really not.

Once five or six years back I made the decision to give CES a miss. I had the most relaxing Christmas and New Year break I’ve had for years, and found the thought of all my fellow journalists jetting off to Vegas at the start of January for the annual CES madness genuinely hilarious. Yet in the months that followed I found myself constantly behind the curve, as if the TV industry and my fellow TV journalists were discussing things that I just didn’t know enough about.

And so, painful though CES may be for both my finances as a freelance writer and my general health and well being, I for one expect that I’ll still be jumping on the CES merry go round every year for the foreseeable future. Though to say that I entirely understand and respect the decision of other journalists to avoid CES like the plague would be an understatement of Las Vegas-sized proportions.